Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 311

This week's picture prompt was taken by Julio Lopez Saguar, a photographer from Madrid. It was taken at Central Station at Koln (Cologne), Germany. As I have been there I can confirm that it is a huge station. I like the balance of the links above and below. 

Taking me a while to put this one together but I'm really happy how it came out. This picture always reminds me of the opening of Some Kind of Wonderful - if you are old enough to know that film! 

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Tracks

I can’t tell youhow many times I’ve walked these tracks. Back and forth all day long, checking connections,clearing out dirt, making them stable, fixing lines, defrosting signals,replacing lights, the list goes on and on.

There’s a thrill to it as you cross thelive lines, and occasionally risk being squashed between two trains going indifferent directions. You don’t have to keep an eye out though, you can feel itthrough the ground: the tracks vibrating, shots of lightning dashing along thelines above your head. Trains have an energy, and the longer you work on thelines the more in tune with it you become.

No matter how busy the world is around you,all the rushing about people do: going to and from work, shopping, catching ashow, out on the town; once you’re on the tracks all that disappears. You tuneright out and into the frequency of that energy. Like hearing a tuning fork allday long. And you still feel it in your body when you leave at night.

Although I seem to have been here for ages today;longer than normal – at least it feels like it.

This morning I was busy chasing off some ofthose graffiti lot. They were over by the siding spraying their rubbish on anythingthey could find. There are some that call it art, but it’s not art, it’sindecipherable letters that only have meaning for them. Like some kind of turfwarfare, where they are passing messages back and forth.

You never see their faces, always dressedin baggy clothing and several hoodies over their heads, and sometimes scarvesto stop the toxic sprays from getting in their faces – though I always thoughtpart of it was about getting high from the fumes.

But I’d been running them off, shouting andthreatening to call the cops, and they ran out across the tracks, exactly whereI didn’t want them to go.

The 5:15 from Doncaster was coming through,as was the 5:12 from Sheffield. They always crossed here. And I knew they werecoming, I could feel it - had for a few minutes already.

Cleaning up the mess of people who get inthe way of high speed trains is not fun at all, I can tell you. Plus it meansstopping everything on the line for hours while the police come, and all theemergency services, and the reporters; it’s a complete melee.

Anyway, one of them went and tripped, didn’the? Went down like a sack of potatoes, and didn’t look like he was getting upanytime soon. So I rushed over to him, and tried to bring him round, his mateslooking on from safety on the other side. They could hear the trains coming tooand weren’t going to risk coming back for their mate. Bloody numpties.

I was trying to get him up, trying to movehim, and then my walkie-talkie fell out of my back pocket, didn’t it, and bloodysmashed on one of the tracks, which meant I had no way of notifying anyone itwasn’t safe.

The energy was really ramping up now, likea high-pitched whine in my nerve endings, literally any second now they weregoing to be here. If you looked you could probably see them in the distance.But I couldn’t look, because I was too busy with this bloody vandal who’d goneand knocked himself out.

Then that sound, you know the electric onethat shoots along the lines above your head, telling you they are on their way,and coming fast and I couldn’t seem to get a grip on this lad; his clothes wereall loose and baggy and I couldn’t work out which way to get a hold on him. Hismates were shouting now, they could see the trains, and I had to debate, stayor go, but I knew the mess it was going to make. If I could just shift him overa couple of tracks.

And then it was over.

He was gone. The vibration must have woken himand got him moving.

His mates were gone too. Probably didn’twant to stick around to see the mess if he didn’t make it.

But I’m here, wondering how I’m going toget the other mess, the one they’d made on the wall, off. But I can’t find mybucket, in fact I can’t find anything and every time I try I just seem to endup back here at this wall.